With March 20, 2023 being International Day of Happiness and in the context of 83 percent of U.S. adults apparently feeling stressed out by economic factors like high inflation, the personal-finance website WalletHub has released a report on 2023’s ‘Happiest Cities in America’.
What makes for a ‘happy city’? For WalletHub’s assessment a number of factors were considered to determine where people in the U.S. are most content with their lives. This involved WalletHub comparing more than 180 of the largest U.S. cities across 30 key indicators of happiness.
Happy is a difficult concept to reduce to metrics; nonetheless, there are factors that can promote ‘unhappiness’ and evaluating these can provide some form of measure of a likely happiness quotient. The data set ranged from depression rate to income-growth rate to average leisure time spent per day.
The assessment finds the top ten happiest cities in the U.S. to be:
1. Fremont, CA
2. San Jose, CA
3. Madison, WI
4. Overland Park, KS
5. San Francisco, CA
6. Irvine, CA
7. Columbia, MD
8. Sioux Falls, SD
9. South Burlington, VT
10. Burlington, VT
These are followed by the next ten:
11. Seattle, WA
12. Bismarck, ND
13. Oakland, CA
14. Huntington Beach, CA
15. San Diego, CA
16. Scottsdale, AZ
17. Minneapolis, MN
18. Yonkers, NY
19. Aurora, IL
20. Fargo, ND
Given the range of different data points assessed it is unsurprising to come across different variations. For example, Fremont, California, which is number one across the range also has the lowest depression rate at 11.90 percent. This output is 2.5 times lower than in Huntington, West Virginia (the city with the highest depression rate at 30.10 percent).
Taking a different city and leading indicator, with Newark, New Jersey, this city has the lowest number of suicides per 100,000 residents at 4.93. This metric is 7.9 times lower than in Casper, Wyoming, the city with the highest at 39.05.
Returning to Fremont, California, the city also has the lowest separation and divorce rate, at 9.02 percent. This figure is 4.6 times lower than in Cleveland, the city with the highest at 41.59 percent.
Getting sufficient rest is of importance. South Burlington, Vermont, has the lowest share of adults sleeping less than 7 hours per night, 24.00 percent, which is 1.9 times lower than in Detroit, the city with the highest at 45.90 percent.
Finally, another source of happiness or frustration is commuting. Here, Missoula, Montana and Juneau, Alaska, have the lowest average commute time, 15.50 minutes, which is 2.7 times lower than in New York, the city with the highest at 41.40 minutes.
